Keri Russell talks about motherhood and new film ‘Dark Skies’

Keri Russell’s “comeback year” has the feel of a re­invention, a rebranding of the dainty young lovely who burst on the scene with “Felicity” back in 1998.

But as different as her flinty mom in the new film “Dark Skies” might seem, as dangerous and “out there” as her born-again Bolshevik sleeper spy is in TV’s “The Americans” (Wednesday nights on FX), she refuses to label her return to public view a career makeover.

“The great thing about disappearing is that people forget about you a little bit,” Russell says. “Your past is forgotten. You can come back as something fresh and new. These past two years, I’ve come back to all these interesting things that people might not have thought about me for in the past. They just happened.”

She stepped away from film and TV half a dozen years ago, getting married and giving birth to two children, who are now 1 and 5. At 36, she’s a different person — a mom, for starters. And it’s made her a different actress.

“Anything that opens you up emotionally is going to impact your acting,” she says. “Parenthood, becoming a mom, certainly does that. For one thing, you practice storytelling at its most basic.”

Basic, and maybe primal. Russell’s return to the big screen has her playing a suburban mom whose children are threatened by a supernatural menace. Her turn as Lacy Barrett in “Dark Skies” was informed by her own motherhood — and by imagining real-life motherly terrors.

“It’s heartbreaking to think of. They’re scared to death, and you have this terrifying, hopeless feeling, knowing that you might not be able to protect them. I kept that in the back of my mind in every scene where something extraordinary was happening to us all. You’re scared to death, but you’ve narrowed your focus to these kids and this one job I have — protecting them.”